Does Your Middle School-age Child Feel Stupid

Does your middle school-age child feel stupid because he/she is lacking fundamental arithmetic skills?

Recently, a fifth grade student told me she’d never be able to go to college. She knew this, she explained, because she didn’t know her multiplication table and some other basic math facts. She was so embarrassed about these missing pieces of knowledge that she didn’t want to touch math at all.

Not knowing multiplication facts was, of course, also a barrier to learning division, fractions, and decimals. Most important, however, was its negative affect on her self-image. This is, unfortunately, a common occurrence. Students who haven’t mastered fundamental arithmetic skills by 3rd or 4th grade often see their lack of skill and understanding not as a temporary situation, but a reflection of permanent, built-in limits to their intelligence. They become convinced they can’t learn math: not now; not ever.

It doesn’t have to stay this way!

$help-your-child-to-focus-on-math$ Students can change their self-images and learn what is necessary to be a successful math learners.

What is important for parents to realize is that:

Students differ in how easily they learn math facts, and in how they learn them, and that these differences don’t represent some inherent lack of ability to learn math altogether.

Plain memorization doesn’t work for many students. Other strategies (link) often work better.

The optimal zone of learning is the zone of familiarity: the skills and knowledge students already have. The development of new skills and knowledge must begin here. If students missed out on math content because they weren’t ready when it was first presented, it doesn’t mean they can’t learn math. It means that they, like everyone else, need to learn what they have not yet learned, beginning from what they have already learned.

Engaging the student in the learning process by giving him many opportunities of input into what he thinks he needs to learn.

Know that it is much harder for parents to work with their own children than with an outside resource.

Catching up becomes increasingly harder the wider the gap grows and the more confidence gets eroded. The curriculum moves on and students and parents are left on their own fill in the missing pieces.

Just remember that everyone can learn math!